Promoting Children's Rights in European Schools

Intercultural Dialogue and Facilitative Pedagogy

Claudio Baraldi, Erica Joslyn, Federico Farini, Chiara Ballestri, Luisa Conti, Vittorio Iervese, Angela Scollan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350217805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Promoting Children's Rights in European Schools explores how facilitators, teachers and educators can adopt and use a dialogic methodology to solicit children's active participation in classroom communication. The book draws on a research project, funded by the European Commission (Erasmus +, Key-action 3, innovative education), coordinated by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, with the partnership of the University of Suffolk, UK, and the University of Jena, Germany. The author team bring together the analysis of activities in 48 classes involving at least 1000 children across England, Germany and Italy. These activities have been analysed in relation to the sociocultural context of the involved schools and children, a facilitative methodology and the use of visual materials in the classroom, and engaging children in active participation and the production of their own narratives. Each chapter looks at reflection on practice, outcomes, and reaction to facilitation of both teachers and children, drawing out the complex comparative lessons within and between classrooms across the three countries.

1

The SHARMED Project: The Conceptual Framework

Claudio Baraldi Erica Joslyn and Federico Farini

1.1 Introduction

The Shared Memories and Dialogues project (SHARMED) is a project funded by the European Commission (Erasmus +, Key-action 3, innovative education), coordinated by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), in partnership with University of Jena (Germany) and University of Suffolk (England). The project was conducted between 2016 and 2018.

The SHARMED project was designed to promote intercultural dialogue in multicultural classrooms and explore innovative learning and teaching approaches that amplify all children’s voices within multicultural communities. The SHARMED philosophy is underpinned by a belief that children’s empowerment and their contributions in social and educational settings are a determining mechanism for building strong and inclusive communities for young people.

In its design, the SHARMED project was concerned with the production of narratives based on children’s memories and the ways in which these narratives are constructed and negotiated in classroom interactions. Children participating in the SHARMED project were aged eight to thirteen years, and the project purposefully included children from both migrant and non-migrant backgrounds from selected schools in three European countries – Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom (particularly in England). While in Italy and Germany the project involved primary and secondary schools children, covering the full range of educational levels considered by the project, in England only primary school children participated in the project. The choice to work exclusively with primary school children was motivated by three considerations: (1) the results-driven and competitive vocation of secondary education in England made teachers less prepared to waive teaching time for the project’s activities than primary school colleagues; (2) primary school curricula include a subject-personal, social and health education-where learning is project-based and collaboration with external partners are more familiar to teachers; (3) primary education in England extends over six years, compared to five years in Italy and four years in Germany. Grade 6 children in England are in primary schools, but they are in lower-secondary schools (middle schools) in Italy and in secondary schools in Germany.

The parents of participating children were invited to support their children’s participation through choice of photographs or other artefacts and to provide their written consent about their child’s inclusion into the SHARMED school project. Later, they were also involved in filling a questionnaire (see Chapter 2) and finally in commenting the project results. Headteachers and teachers were invited to collaborate in the project, and these volunteers were key to the success of the project especially in supporting and motivating children and their parents. In particular, teachers organized and supervised the classroom activities planned by the project. These activities involved some facilitators, which were hired by the three university partners with the task of enhancing children’s active participation and dialogue among children, with particular attention of participation of children with migrant background. Finally, researchers documented the activities included in the project in order to provide a methodologically oriented evaluation. This book is based on this research activity.

1.2 Theoretical Constructs Embedded within the SHARMED Philosophy

The SHARMED philosophy is based on a unique combination of six conceptual dimensions that inform and shape the methodological and analytical design of the project:

1. An anti-essentialist view of intercultural communication and cultural identity;

2. Personal narratives as a mechanism for personal empowerment;

3. The significance of meanings attributed to photographs and other artefacts;

4. The influence of memory, relating to narratives and photographs;

5. The value of facilitation as a means to create communities of dialogue;

6. A recognition of potential conflict situations inherent in multicultural settings.

1.2.1 Intercultural Communication and Cultural Diffusion

Often, the definition of ‘multicultural’ is based primarily on the presence of participants from a variety of cultural backgrounds (Mahon & Cushner 2012). Studies show that there are a variety of ways for handling cultural meanings and identity (Gay 2000; Gundara 2000; Gundara & Portera 2008; Herrlitz & Maier 2005; Mahon & Cushner 2012). Importantly, these studies show that both social and self-identity are commonly associated with communication within specific cultural groups (Hofstede 1980; Schell 2009; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin 2009; Ting-Toomey 1999). This is an essentialist perspective which ‘presents people’s individual behaviour as entirely defined and constrained by the cultures in which they live so that the stereotype becomes the essence of who they are’ (Holliday 2011: 4). However, according to Baraldi (2015b), essentialism takes for granted that cultural identities are determined before intercultural communication. Baraldi argues that the essentialist ideology is a feature of ‘othering’ – a process whereby the Western world attempts to legitimize its hegemony at the expenses of ‘others’ (Holliday 2011). Essentialism emphasizes internal cultural stereotypes and Guillherme (2012) argues that it interprets dialogue as enrichment based on acknowledgement of differences among predefined cultural identities (Alred et al. 2003; Grant & Portera 2011; Portera 2008).

The anti-essentialist view stresses the prefix ‘inter’, which indicates the importance of relationships and communication, and warns against insisting on predefined cultural identities which are based on an essentialist representation of cultural belonging (Byrd Clark & Dervin 2014). Identity is seen as fluid, malleable and contingently constructed in communication (Dervin & Liddicoat 2013; Piller 2007; Tupas 2014). Some authors conclude that the primacy of cultural identity is replaced by the construction of hybrid identity (Jackson 2014; Kramsch & Uryu 2012; Nair-Venugopal 2009), which means that identity is always negotiated in communication processes through the manifestation of personal cultural trajectories (Holliday & Amadasi 2020).

The SHARMED project is grounded within an anti-essentialist perspective and is focused on the construction of narratives within communication processes. Thus, it replicates the importance of social participation and communication in the development of a genuine intercultural understanding in educational settings. In seeking to promote intercultural education, this study is focused on building classroom relationships and promoting dialogue. Hybridity is conceived as the outcome of a complex intertwining of interactions designed to ‘open up many possibilities for how narratives can intertwine and express themselves’ (Holliday & Amadasi 2020: 11). In this anti-essentialist perspective, classrooms are the setting for sharing narratives about personal cultural trajectories – the production of ‘small cultures’ (Holliday 1999).

Thus, in SHARMED, the classroom is ‘multicultural’ since it supports the production of a variety of small cultures rather than being the sum of individuals with different, predefined cultural identities. A theoretical point with pivotal implications for the aims of the project is that communication is intercultural when it produces narratives of cultural varieties (Baraldi 2015b). SHARMED aims to enhance children’s participation via innovative participatory pedagogies. SHARMED does not aim to generate intercultural communication because, according to the project’s theoretical foundations, intercultural communication may or may not constructed by participants in interaction through their choices. The promotion of agency may support intercultural communication because it creates the condition for participants’ choices; however, if agency is taken seriously, intercultural communication is not necessarily a consequence of agency. The same is true for participants’ identities: SHARMED does not aim to support the preservation or the change of cultural identities. Children’s participation may or may not lead to the construction of cultural identities in interaction.

For SHARMED, promoting children’s participation means promoting children’s choices. SHARMED rejects instrumental approaches to the promotion of children’s participation that would reduce children’s agency. An important theoretical, methodological and ethical aspect of SHARMED is that using children’s participation to achieve any pre-determined objective, including the construction of intercultural communication, contradicts the conditions of children’s agency because children’s choices are subordinated to adults’ agenda.

1.2.2 Narratives

The production of personal narratives as a means to empowerment was at the centre of the SHARMED project and draws on two perspectives. First, narration in the context of interpreting and assessing communications (Fisher 1987; Somers 1994), and second, narrative as storytelling (Norrick 2013: 200).

According to Fisher, all forms of communication are stories, situational, as well as historically and culturally grounded. He suggests that ‘narration is the context for interpreting and assessing all communication’ as it is omnipresent in communication (Fisher 1987: 193). The SHARMED project accepts this definition and recognizes narratives as social constructions, in which the observed reality is interpreted and ‘storied’ in different ways. Similarly, Somers (1994) describes ways of narrative construction – differentiating narratives of the self (ontological narratives), public narratives, conceptual narratives (including scientific concepts) and metanarratives concerning ‘the epic dramas of our time’ (Somers 1994: 619). The SHARMED project draws on her distinction between ontological narratives and narratives concerning the wider society (public narratives, metanarratives).

Secondly, Norrick (2007) argues that public narratives as storytelling do concern not only the story content but also the rights associated with the activity of narrating. For the SHARMED project, the construction of public narratives based on autobiographical memory provided the opportunity to highlight meanings and identity of narrating participants (Bamberg 2005, 2011). In the telling of their narratives, participants ‘create and recreate’ their past in the light of their ‘present needs and concerns’ (Norrick 2007: 139). Within the SHARMED context, activities of narration were structured around three features (Norrick 2007, 2013):

• First, each participant contributes to constructing and negotiating a narrative in interactions as teller, co-teller, listener or elicitor of new narratives.

• Second, narratives can be either first-person narratives or vicarious narratives.

• Third, narratives can receive different comments from different participants; in particular, each narrative can be followed by response narratives that refer to it, and this enhances the production of interlaced stories.

1.2.3 Narratives, Photographs and Memory

In SHARMED, the construction of narratives was stimulated by personal photographs, propelling storytelling and other forms of collaborative engagement. The construction of these public narratives helped children to connect the image of a photograph with insight about situations and circumstances that lie behind the image. According to Baraldi and Iervese (2017) narratives can focus on both the image in photographs and the situations and circumstances behind and beyond photographs. This focus enables images to explore social and cultural contexts of photographs as well as to create new stories linked to images.

Use of photographs in the SHARMED project relied on the premise that the interactional production of narratives depends on past actions (taking pictures) that were designed for other purposes and only later do they become important in the specific context of remembering. While photographs allow access to captured moments of personal lives, to revisiting personal feelings and to preserving memory, they can also enhance and invite connections. In the SHARMED project, photography was not only understood as a technology for documenting life; photographs were also used as a powerful medium for social engagement and collaboration.

Research by Moline (2011) and Baraldi and Iervese (2017) have confirmed that the use of visual materials can positively engage children in creative workshops and that photographs are a powerful medium to stimulate personalized and interactive narratives in educational settings. Within the SHARMED project, photographs did not only elicit children’s responses to visual inputs, but they also provided colloquial talking points – invigorating participation in classroom dialogue. In other words, children were able to fully participate in a range of conversations through, about and with photographs – engaging and building intercultural understandings and friendships in the process.

The SHARMED project recognized that memory does not only depend on people’s awareness of their past, but also on the reflection of the past in the context of present social and cultural experiences. Against this interpretation of memory, the SHARMED project was designed to use photographs (and other artefacts in few cases) as triggers for recall and the exploration of individual comprehension and insight of captured memory.

1.2.4 Facilitation Designed to Create ‘Communities of Dialogue’

Research has shown the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequence (Mehan 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard 1975) of teacher-initiated questions, student responses and teacher evaluation reproducing hierarchical structures (Farini 2011; Margutti 2010; Seedhouse 2004; Walsh 2011) that often limit the opportunities of children to participate (James & James 2004; Wyness 1999). For the SHARMED project, this traditional approach to classroom practice was rejected because it was accepted that the hierarchical IRE approach would children’s agency and children’s dialogue primacy within the classroom as required by the aims of the project.

It was crucial to the SHARMED project that classroom practice was designed to support co-equal relationships across all participants. It was essential that children’s voices, their social and cultural identities and intercultural engagement should be made possible through the structure and conduct of the classroom. To this end, interactive classroom practice was designed to support non-hierarchical relationships between children and between children and the facilitator and included ways of evaluating the delivery and conduct of these interactions.

The facilitative pedagogy was designed to promote personalized versions of cultural meanings (Abdallah-Pretceille 2006) enabling the creation of small cultures through dialogic negotiation among participants. It was a key strategy designed to support two project imperatives – to mitigate hierarchical forms of teacher and child relationships and to fortify children’s agency.

A number of writers promote the notion of children’s agency (James 2009; James & James 2008; Oswell 2013). In this perspective, children’s actions are not simple outputs of children’s experience of adults’ inputs. Showing agency means showing the availability of choices of action, opening different possible courses of action, so that a specific course of action is one among various possibilities (Baraldi 2014a; Harré & van Langhenove 1999). The project recognized children’s agency as children’s active participation enhanced through the availability of choices of action, which subsequently enhance alternative actions, and therefore change in the interaction. While children’s active participation can happen anytime in communication, the achievement of agency needs the promotion of a child’s right to active participation in relation to choice and construction of meaning. In the SHARMED project, by seeking children’s agency and recognizing a child’s right to construct their own narrative we enabled participants to contribute to collaborative and cultural understandings within their classroom communities – enabling them to gain epistemic authority (Heritage & Raymond 2005).

Some researchers argue that analysis of agency must focus on its social conditions and structures (Bjerke 2011; James 2009; Leonard 2016; Mayall 2002; Moosa-Mitha 2005). This research shows that structural limitations can be imposed on individual participation and these can be particularly inhibitive for children, who are often included within a hierarchical generational order (Alanen 2009).

Research on teacher–children interactions...